EXHIBITION

So Long Roger Fenton…

Monster Truck Gallery & Studios, Dublin, Dublin, 09/01/2011 - 10/08/2011

73 Francis Street

ABOUT



MerriganThe career of Roger Fenton, arguably the first war photographer, is exemplary of an all too contemporary phenomenon: that of the embedded journalist. Having been sent to the Crimea in early 1855 by the British state, Fenton was blocked from taking pictures of the dead, the maimed or indeed any other subjects that would reflect poorly on the war effort abroad.

Due to the constraints of camera technology at the time, the photographs he returned to the popular press showed staged tableaux of a dignified military life. From its very inception, aesthetic journalism proved itself to be subject to directorial manipulations and interpretive control. The idea of the objective witness, the foundation of the journalistic attitude, was complicated by Fenton who revealed a way of working thoroughly embedded in its social matrix and complicit with the people his photographs represented.

Today, with the diffusion of socially committed art forms (dealing with the political, the humanitarian & the inter-subjective), artists are reinventing modes of collaboration and co-authorship. Robert Capa’s oft quoted maxim ‘if your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough’ finds unexpected confirmation in an epoch where artists are increasingly adept at swinging between a position of being ‘too close’ or ‘not close enough’ in order to access a context, engage with a constituency and influence an outcome.

Whereas elsewhere it is almost taboo to break the sanctity of passive representation, artists are entering the battlefield, so to speak, as active players and social provocateurs. 

Taking Fenton’s embeddedness in the Crimea as a leitmotif, So Long Roger Fenton… brings together artists who negotiate the complexities of commitment in critical art practice through strategies of proximity, collusion and consultancy.

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APT ARTISTS ON VIEW

Chris Evans

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